works

• PANOPTICON XXXX // 2006
• SUN1 // 2005
• Labyrinth Vert // 2002
• Tilos // 2002

still from: PANOPTICON XXXX

Véronique Rizzo’s work is drawn upon a thorough knowledge of Art History’s recent moments. Oriented essentially towards abstraction (from Russian avant-garde to Op art, Bauhaus or concrete art…) this specific understanding sets the foundations to a body of work which (re)defines, breaks from, challenges and/or amplifies these theoretical grounds.

Rizzo operates at the source of the world’s transformations, the questioning, the success or failure of our great ideological theories and programs, that have accompanied modernist abstraction. Setting an ironic or supportive viewpoint on this formal thinking, she draws her visual vocabulary from these geometrical shapes, conferred with meaning. May it be Vasarely’s motifs in the video Tilos, Jean Arp’s or Pol Bury’s in Gestalt, they characterize the foundations of an Art, which, at the time of digital techniques, will replay, animate and mix visual experimentations…
After the fixed image of painting, follows video and its movement. To the narrow and restrictive idea of the shape as a self-sufficient entity, is substituted the acceptance of motifs originating from our popular culture: closing credits from television programs and 60’s and 70’s movies, comic strips, sci-fi, urban culture, electronic music, psychedelia… In her body of work, all is brought together.

As all utopias have been broken down by rational political strategies, as kinetic forms have been absorbed by the marketing industry, visual identity, and images’ persistency, Rizzo acts on these, and plays the card of the sensory and the sensational.

Her video -installations- have an undeniable vibrating value, invariably placing them in the field of “physical experience”. Somewhat oppressing (Panopticon XXXX), resonating (Tilos), narrative (Labyrinthe Vert) or hypnotic (Sun1), all of her works express and celebrate the emotional strength of shape and form. If Rizzo’s work can be perceived as a questioning, it also has to be understood as an assertion. That is, the validity of motif on physical reality; and it is precisely this strength, which is given straightforwardly to us as a lively and sensible geometry.